The Roundabout Argument

It started over a roundabout, of all things. Renata took the wrong exit and Klara said nothing, which was worse than saying something, and I watched the back of Klara's neck go tight. Five more minutes, Renata said. It's fine. It's not a competition. Nobody said it was a competition, Klara said, in the voice she uses when it absolutely is one. I leaned my head on the window. The fields went by the way fields do, all the same and somehow never the same twice. I thought about telling them what Dad said to me in March, the thing in the hospital corridor when the machine was beeping and he held my wrist too hard. I had been carrying it for two months. It felt like a coin I'd swallowed. But you can't hand someone a thing like that on a motorway. You need a kitchen for it. You need the kettle on.